Historical Fiction
by Mariagoner
Summary: Sometimes, Hyuuga Hinata wants to rewrite history. NejiHina, Neji X Hinata.


As always I always long for reviews for anything I've written-- constructive criticism is especially welcome, but flames (I'm still looking forward to my first one!) and other miscellany are gladly gathered in as well. Hit me with what you've got-- I'm a big girl and I can take it. ;) And thanks for reading, above all.

Title: Historical Fiction

Fandom: Naruto

Characters: Hinata, Neji, Hanabi, Hiashi

Pairings: Hinata X Neji

Rating: PG

Summary: Sometimes Hyuuga Hinata wants to rewrite history.

Disclaimer: I really, really, really, really, REALLY don't own any of the characters or situations in this fic. Nevertheless, creative license is awesome, yes?

Note: This piece is a follow-up to an earlier, daker work titled "Broken Touch," also on Hyuuga Hinata wants to rewrite history.

Sometimes, she wants to pretend that she hasn't been a failure all her life. Sometimes she wants to pretend that she was, if not the best of her generation, at least not a disappointment to those around her from the time she learned to walk on. Sometimes, she likes to believe that the glances she sees from those around her, from her elders, from the Branch house, from her father on down, aren't composed of half pity and half apathy. Sometimes she likes to think that even the kindest of those around her don't have low expectations of her, don't feel as though they have to carry on the most difficult tasks without her help, don't have to continually reassure themselves that at least she has the Hyuuga bloodline and that had to make her worth something in the abscess of natural talent.

Sometimes she wishes those strange eyes of hers were actually as inept at reading people as her father always said they were.

Sometimes, she thinks of the present she lives in, the past that still lingers behind her, and the future she wants to escape from. In this, she thinks first and foremost of her father... and the way her elder aunts always reminisced about how anxious he had been as a father-to-be near when Hinata was born. His brother had already had a child by the time he knew Hinata existed and, if Hinata closes her eyes tightly enough, she can almost imagine her father cupping his hands around her mother's abdomen, trying to measure how strong she would be from the strength of her preinfantile kicks. She knows that he had all but flown from the clan meeting he had been in at the time to the hospital to witness her birth, and had almost (almost!) wept at the first sign that he had a healthy daughter. It's strange to picture her father actually being happy about something she had done, even if that something had merely been as pedestrian as being born.

She can only bring herself to wish that she had been the sort of child who had been worth all that emotion in the end. Perhaps if she had, it could have changed the way he looked at her, at all of them, now-- with the sort of infinite weariness that silently told her that some things were not worth preserving even for their clan.

Sometimes she thinks of her sister, who she had barely been allowed to know. She can remember, faintly, the memory of looking down at Hanabi's tiny, scrunched infant face when she had first come home with her mother-- and how quiet and still Hanabi had been even then, the seeds of a great shinobi apparent even at that age. She can remember days and days of whiling away her time in Hanabi's room rather than in the clan's endless training halls, and of the memory of retracting her own chubby fingers just in time to avoid Hanabi grabbing them in a childhood game now nearly forgotten.

Even then, Hanabi had been almost faster then her. And even now, Hinata remains proud-- even after Hanabi has been raised to regard her as less a sister than a stepping stone to a birthright that fate had hindered her from. No matter what shape Hinata's flights of fancy took, she knows that detail would never quite alter.

And sometimes, most bitterly of all, she thinks of her mother, who she remembers so clearly that the line between genuine memory and wishful thinking is hopelessly blurred. She thinks of her mother and the touch of her skin, the edenic scent of her hair, and the slow, disarming smile that was always directed first at Hinata-- as though even then her mother had know of how needy she was even then. Hinata thinks of the way she always followed her about like a shadow, like an almost proper shin obi, as though Hyuuga Hisano had been the sole thing keeping a child as twisted inside as the surface of a scar intact and relatively unharmed.

Perhaps that really had been the case. All Hinata really knows is that after she had died, her father had shattered and her sister had stopped being a child and she had finally learned that she would always fail when she tried to please her clan. The only goal left, really, had been to try and please herself.

Sometimes Hinata thinks back on her life and wonders if she's even managed that much.

But then her thoughts always wander back to her cousin Neji, and the way he looks at her now. And she thinks of how different his looks are from those he gave her before Naruto had done the impossible and taught him something real about life. She thinks of how his eyes sometimes avert-- just a little-- when their eyes meet, and how small, but frequent, his smiles are when they accidentally run into each other in the high, white halls of the Hyuuga. She thinks of the one time they had actually collided together-- she moving too fast and he too slow, in a startling change of pace-- and the way his hair had fanned across the floor as she had collapses upon him, startled breaths mingling in a tactile moment of truth.

She thinks of how kind he can be, nowadays, during the training sessions her father was convinced could bridge the tremendous gap between them just a bit. Though she doesn't know of anyone else who quite shares that logic, she knows Neji takes the responsibility seriously and insists on being with her as often as possible. Neji wouldn't be Neji if he weren't always unerringly truthful, but he actually pauses now before he speaks to her, and spends as much time telling her what she does right as well as wrong.

Something about his gaze still makes her blush from her roots down to her toes when he rakes his eyes over her. He has not and probably never will temper down his own skills to match her merely adequate ones. But he is far kinder than what he previously was, and when he lets his fingers ghost over her during a sparring session, sometimes all he does is... touch her. As though there were nothing he would like more than to apply his skin to hers and look and look and look at her, and discover all that she had become since the first time he had met her. During those times, all Hinata could do was blush and look to the clouds and think of the kind child he had been before, and the merciless adolescent he had warped into, and the better man he was growing into now.

Sometimes, all she can do is think about the way that Neji kisses her good night when he escorts her home, and feel something warm and once-reserved for Naruto alone heat her from deep inside. He always runs his fingers through her knotted hair before he kisses her on her smooth, unblemished forehead... and there isn't the faintest hint of despair or violence in the language of his fingers brushing her nape or his lips trailing across against her skin, meandering down to touch her shy smile. And if the way he buries his face in her neck when they embrace isn't quite brotherly, and if the hitch of her breath as he holds her isn't quite sisterly... Hinata doesn't mind, doesn't bother to think of other dreams this moment passes by. She knows that neither she nor Neji have the power to rewrite history-- but she does know that he has the ability to make all the pain and hurt that came before worthwhile.

Sometimes, Hinata Hyuuga wants to rewrite history. And sometimes she realizes that those ambitions is foolish beyond all measure.

Because once in a while, she realizes that what she has now is already more than enough.


End file.
